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Drobo beefs up filer FS box

Eight drives now

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Drobo has beefed up its five-slot Drobo FS network-attached stage (NAS) box by adding three more drive bays and a replication feature.

The DroboPro FS, like the desktop storage DroboPro and the multi-host SAN (storage area network) Drobo Elite, has eight drive bays plus a Drobo Sync facility for replicating data to a second Drobo in case the first one breaks.

There are two gigabit Ethernet ports plus the standard Drobo feature set of being able to populate the box with disk drives of similar or dissimilar capacity, and the BeyondRAID feature that tracks every data block and enables recovery from a drive failure. Naturally the Drobo lightshow is present as well, with the simple traffic light scheme for drive health and capacity usage and the blue light set for overall capacity take-up.

The second Ethernet port can be used as a standby port, covering against primary port failure.

The Sync feature copies a full data set initially to the remote Drobo, and then copies incremental changes, meaning blocks in fils or complete new files, on a set schedule or on demand. The Drobo Pro FS is available now with Drobo Sync available as a free download later this month.

A base Drobo Pro FS configuration costs $1,999, with a 16TB unit costing $3,299. A rack mounting unit is available if needed. ®